215 Quotes by Stephanie Coontz

Selective memory is not a bad thing when it leads children to forget arguments in the back seat of the car and to look forward to their next vacation. But it’s a serious problem when it leads grown-ups to try to re-create a past that either never existed at all or whose seemingly attractive features were inextricably linked to injustices and restrictions on liberty that few Americans would tolerate today.

Males are also damaged by gender expectations that have changed enough to erode many old sources of masculine self-esteem but not enough to lessen the pressures on them to maintain or reinvent “manly” behaviors and images.29.

What about traditional Chinese and Sudanese ghost or spirit marriages, in which one of the partners is actually dead? In these societies a youth might be given in marriage to the dead son or daughter of another family, in order to forge closer ties between the two sets of relatives.

Our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sitcoms.

Twenty-six American states passed laws explicitly prohibiting or limiting the employment of married women in various fields. By 1940 more than three-quarters of the school systems in the United States refused to hire married women as teachers.9.

Trying to adopt a consistent position on whether state intervention is good or bad for privacy may be like demanding that scientists choose whether light consists of waves or particles, when it consists of both.

I do not believe, then, that marriage was invented to oppress women any more than it was invented to protect them. In most cases, marriage probably originated as an informal way of organizing sexual companionship, child rearing, and the daily tasks of life.

In Europe and the United States today such an arrangement would be a surefire recipe for jealousy, bitter breakups, and very mixed-up kids. But among the Bari people this practice was in the best interests of the child. The secondary fathers were expected to provide the child with fish and game, with the result that a child with a secondary father was twice as likely to live to the age of fifteen as a brother or sister without such a father.32.

Today married people in Western Europe and North America are generally happier, healthier, and better protected against economic setbacks and psychological depression than people in any other living arrangement.